The exhibition investigates the increased use of basic building materials – cement and concrete – as materials used in sculpture and painting in art in Israel over the last decade. Thirty years after the definition of Arte Pauvre, grey unexciting and uncelebrated concrete appears in art for different reasons. Not poverty, ascetic or secular but a kind of materiality that has seeped into local art from a concreted and fortified environment. Concrete, in the Israeli landscape appears everywhere; ingredients for local nourishment, a basic element in the Israeli ethos, the Zionist promise and hope. Concrete, Bulimia focuses on the cumulative process of concretization, of sealing and hardening; of the insatiable appetite and passion for concrete, the appropriate Zionist solution to every offence and threat. The exhibition touches on the cumulative build up that protection, shelter and walls create and the views the pain of the mounds of crushed concrete after the wars and the black clouds of dust the raise before our eyes.

The works in the exhibition refer to the clotted world, saturated with cement and concrete that appear in the drawings, the foliage, the pleats of our clothes, the folds in the body, the wrung rags, benches, cupboards, tiles, fires and utensils: a concrete membrane, a grey hard skin that envelops our emotional, political and cultural lives.